Student scores the best way to grade teachers? Your Say

Wow! Patrick Welsh's column "Grading teachers on test scores: Column" was a thought-provoking piece. As a veteran teacher at T.C. Williams High School in Virginia, Welsh has firsthand knowledge of the unintended consequences of ranking teachers based on students' test scores.

Teachers must embrace his words as a wake-up call. Policymakers should, at the very least, take them as wisdom. Too many times, those who are not educators harken back to the days when they were in school to wrap their minds around today's complex issues. Unfortunately, the schools they remember no longer exist. Thank you, Patrick Welsh, for your efforts and 30 years of service.

— Otis Elam

I am a big advocate of testing to measure growth in students. But any system can be improperly used and the numbers manipulated to promote political outcomes.

Most of my teaching career was spent working with at-risk kids, the ones destined to fail. The scores of my students cannot be compared with the scores of the AP teacher's students. But my students' scores should be compared with their previous test scores to see how far my students have advanced.

Standardized tests are being "dumbed down" in order to make more students successful, and grade inflation in academics is the athletic equivalent of giving trophies for seventh-place teams. We need to do better by establishing high expectations for our students.

— Douglas Miller

The state of Hawaii takes this further. Teachers can be fired or their pay can suffer based on low growth. I had typical growth my first year as a math teacher. Hawaii's state test is one of the hardest, and administrators put unrealistic goals on schools. My rate was said to prove that I must be an ineffective teacher. I worked so hard but was told I suck and was fired my first year! Thank goodness for the union, or I might not have been given a chance at year two.

— Melissa Ha'o

Letter to the editor:

Patrick Welsh is absolutely right when he says we should not be evaluating teachers based on students' tests scores. It has a pernicious effect on the quality of education students receive, and it is also very damaging to teacher morale.

Teaching to the test has not only caused a lot of cheating, but it also has created conditions where certain subjects are rarely taught to younger students, because they won't be tested.

I taught for 28 years, and had kids with all kinds of differences in intellectual, emotional and ethnic makeups, plus a wide diversity of home lives. Basing 40% to 50% of a teacher's evaluation on test scores is not rational, fair or productive.